Yahoo!: 'A Show Me State'

Yahoo! reports fourth-quarter results after the bell tonight. Marissa Mayer needs to show results to continue the stock's momentum.

NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- Yahoo! ( YHOO) shares have enjoyed a tremendous run since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO in mid-July. However, she'll need to deliver results to keep moving the stock higher, as Wall Street looks for answers instead of promises.

It's been six months since I said that Mayer was a bad choice for Yahoo!, noting that she had never led a turnaround project as big as this one. The share price appreciation since her hire date says I'm wrong. As One Republic and Timbaland would say, It's Too Late to Apologize.

Third-quarter earnings from Yahoo! were better-than-expected, boosted by encouraging news from its Asian assets, namely Alibaba. Yahoo! shares have significantly outperformed the Nasdaq in the past six months, gaining 26.4%, compared to a 6.48% gain in the tech-heavy index. Core Yahoo!, specifically its content properties, including Sports, Finance, and others, are going to be Mayer's big focus, as she tries to leverage Yahoo!'s enormous traffic (some 700 million monthly users) into revenue growth.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is looking for Mayer to detail her plans for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm, now that the honeymoon period's ending. " W e believe that Yahoo! is becoming a show me story now that CEO Marissa Mayer has begun to make her impact on the company," Munster wrote in a note.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to earn 28 cents a share on $1.21 billion for the quarter. The Estimize consensus is for 31 cents a share on $1.208 billion in revenue.

Mayer has repeatedly said she is trying to focus on the company's mobile experience and personalization, though that process will take much longer than the six months she's been on the job. The CEO's already had one major problem when it comes to mobile, as Fantasy Football suffered a major outage during the season, upsetting millions of users.